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How to boost reach and engagement for your Linkedin sponsored content

So you’ve dedicated a chunk of your social media advertising budget towards Sponsored content on LinkedIn, hoping to see engagement, and ultimately, results

LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content is a great way of getting your brand in front of your target audience at the right time. If used effectively, it can be used to build brand awareness, engage with your audience, nurture key relationships and finally, generate those much-needed leads.

Sounds great but how exactly can you use it to strengthen your firm’s profile on the professional networking site. It can be challenging to put out steady stream of diverse thought leadership which aims to inspire and engage your followers. At other times, you are able to put out regular content, but it isn’t really resulting in much engagement or an increase in followers

To address some of these challenges, we’ve come up with some tips on how you can increase your reach and drive engagement for your LinkedIn Sponsored updates.

Set clear goals to drive content

What do you ultimately need to achieve with your LinkedIn Sponsored updates? Perhaps you want to build a community and increase engagement with prospects or leads. Or you want to focus on lead generation.

Your content creation strategy should be driven by your end goals and this will influence every aspect of your content.

Are you trying to create brand awareness? Then videos, infographics, informative blogs can help to keep your company at the forefront of people’s minds. Do you want to position yourself as a thought leader? Then post links to long-form content such as whitepapers, reports, case studies or eBooks. If you wish to increase conversation or generate leads, you can link to gated whitepapers, eBooks or webinars with a strong call-to-action encouraging sign-ups. If your aim is to nurture your leads, you can share articles, guides and articles which educate your target base.

Focus on pleasing your audience

To make the best of your Sponsored content, make sure you know who your target audience is. And use this information to guide the type of content you post. The more targeted your campaigns, the higher you are likely to convert.

Think about their jobs and and which industries/sectors do they work in? What are their needs and pain points? How can the content you share directly address this?

While setting up campaigns, you can create targeted campaigns that speak to the needs of each type of your buyer persona. If your buyer person is the upper management team such as CEOs and VPs and directors of HR, for instance, you could perhaps share leadership articles or content highlighting management or economic trends, which may be particularly appealing to them.

Unlike other social networking sites, people usually browse LinkedIn to network, look for jobs, or learn more about their industry. Tap into this ‘professional mindset’ by giving your target audience plenty of content that can help them learn something new, increase knowledge and be productive in their jobs. In addition, sharing your opinion or providing a critical analysis or insight into something can also help to drive engagement

That said, don’t forget that people love an inspiring or uplifting story or a piece of news that can add a new perspective or give them a new lease of life.

Use diverse content types to grab attention

Not all content is quality content. So it might be wise to invest in creating powerful content that is likely to strike a chord with your audience.

Images and videos are a sure-fire way to capture attention in a time when people just don’t seem to have it. Images that have interesting stats or an infographic image is a great way to present information and strike up a conversation.

LinkedIn allows videos from Vimeo, YouTube and Slideshare to play natively within the newsfeed, so use this functionality to share some interesting video content. Keep your videos short (under 2 minutes) and make sure you use subtitles so that people can watch at work or on a commute without the volume.

Text updates, especially if they are from the CEO or member of the C-suite usually demand your reader’s attention. An effective text update is short, intriguing and should make the reader want to know more (which you can follow with a link for instance). You can ask a question, comment on an trending news story from the day or say something thought-provoking aiming at encouraging a discussion.

As is with any kind of advertising, testing results is crucial way to uncover key insights and identify issues.

There’s no point simply sharing content without tracking the performance of posts and its impact towards your overall goal. Apart from engaging audiences, you can use LinkedIn’s Conversion Tracking to see how your ads are helping you achieve your goals, be it lead generation, conversions or purchases. To track conversions, go to Conversion Tracking options in Campaign Manager and add the Insight Tag to the website pages you wish to track.

You can then identify a conversion action (whitepaper download, webinar sign-up or demo registration) and link it to your campaign to track the performance of your content.

Additionally, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience using website demographics to get data on industries, sectors, job titles and company names. This in turn, can help you customise content tailored to their unique needs and interests.

Test and optimise for success

To make the most of your efforts with Sponsored Content, you need to review, monitor and experiment to ensure success.

You can use A/B testing for example, to compare multiple campaigns. Create a duplicate campaign to show the same post to different target audience and see which performed better. You could even run the test on varied versions of the same post to see which performed the best.

Choose the right metrics to track, and this usually depends on your campaign goals. For instance, if you want to track ROI, you could track the number of conversions and the cost per conversions. If your goal was to generate more leads, track the number of sign-ups/registrations. For brand awareness, you could track the number of new followers and engagements.

To make your LinkedIn marketing efforts successful, you need to have clarity on your goals, cater to your target audience with compelling and relevant content, and then finally test and measure performance for optimum results.

To discuss any of the points above or if you need help with executing any of these tactics, docontact us.